LG G5 Android 7.0 Nougat Update Has Started Rolling out

Despite the increasingly cold weather and US election madness, LG G5 owners have at least one thing to be cheery about.

LG has started rolling out Android 7.0 Nougat to the flagship LG G5, at least on its home turf of South Korea. Nougat is, of course, the latest and greatest version of Google’s mobile operating system, announced and launched earlier this year. It’s currently only available on a handful of smartphones, so it’s great to see such an early update from LG. Better still, LG already launched a phone with Nougat straight out of the box in 2016: the LG V20.

Unfortunately, there’s no such luck for LG G5 owners around the globe, including in the UK. LG says that European customers (and elsewhere) will need to wait for the update “in the weeks to come” – sorry, folks.

Google first released Nougat as a beta build back in March this year, but the software didn’t officially launch until August, being made available on the usual roster of Nexus devices. Alongside the LG V20, Nougat was also available on board Google’s new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones by default. HTC has already confirmed that it plans to upgrade its phones to Nougat in the last quarter of 2016, but LG rival Samsung hasn’t made any such commitments.

Typically, it takes several months for a phone maker to get a new version of Android out to customers. First, it has to modify the software to its own liking, and then it has to send it off to carriers for approval. Only then can the new software update be pushed out to users.

Android 7.0 Nougat has been generally well-received as an update, bringing in significant changes like support for the Vulkan graphics engine, as well as a new split-screen feature that lets you display multiple apps on the display at one time.